CONFESSIONS

 

It had been a flying visit from London to Copenhagen, and then Susan had crossed Denmark in the bullet express to catch the Leith boat at Esbjerg. There had been another woman, a fair almost ash blonde in the compartment, but they had kept themselves to themselves. For one thing, the blonde paged ceaselessly through books, as if she were a publisher's reader, and for another Susan had, apart from business, another preoccupation. Her bottom hurt.

It was painful to sit even on the well-padded seats and though in one way it gave her a thrill, the dull aches made her restless. She was continually getting up to admire the view from a window. When the train was making the Great Belt ferry crossing, she got out to walk about the deck, and then, of course, on the second part of the overland journey, the same old round continued till they reached the port.

The boat was comfortably full. Susan went to her cabin (she had a bunk in double one), deposited her things and went on deck to watch the lights of Esbjerg receding in the gathering evening. Then she had dinner. The chairs were considerably harder than the seats in the train, but this did not, in fact, hasten her excellent dinner. The sea was smooth, so she drank Aquavit and chased it with beer. By the time that she paid the bill, she was suffused with a well-being in which her aching buttocks played a not disagreeable part. After a further brief excursion to the upper deck, she found her cabin.

The upper bunk was occupied.

There was a detail which Susan now overlooked. She undressed circumspectly enough and then, on her bunk, she raised her nightie in order to look, Narcissus-like, in the mirror opposite, at her cane stripes. They were still blue and spectacularly raised upon her white skin and she looked at herself first left-handed and then right. It was, she thought, a sight worth seeing, so she looked again. Then she dropped the skirt of her nightie while still looking back, glanced upwards and made mirror contact with the candid gaze of her companion in the top bunk. She had forgotten the potential of a tall sleeping cabin mirror. She felt a spasm of panic and then the reaction. She would brazen it out.

"Hello," she smiled, and raised the nightie again, this time to her waist. The reflected face came nearer. The handsome ash blonde of the train was perhaps thirty years old. She groped back for the switch and turned up the big top light.

"D'you mind my looking?"

"Er... "

"What happened? You don't look as if you're still at school."

Susan was twenty six.

"No. Don't even teach." She went on examining her buttocks and then, because the other made no further comment and some explanation seemed to be called for, she added "I've just been to my Confessions Club."

"Oh yeah?"

"The night before last, actually."

She lowered her nightie a second time.

"May I see again? I've often wondered ... name's Fiona, by the way."

"Susan," said Susan, and once more uncovered her hinder parts, but this time in something of a daze. What on earth was happening to her? She glanced at the door to make sure that it was locked.

"Didn't you have corporal punishment?" she said to Fiona.

"My schools had it, but I was a bit goody-goody and people never showed me ..."

"Not at home either?"

"Parents didn't believe in it ... You?"

"Only a bit at school, but my step-mother caned me. In fact she caned me until I was over sixteen."

"Step-mother's blessing?"

"Not really. She thought it was quicker and cleaner."

"How did she do it?"

"On the bare."

"But wasn't it awful ... or not?"

"We got on very well, actually ... and she introduced me to the Confessions Club."

"I can imagine what that is about, but does your step-mother ..."

"Oh no! She makes a point of not going when ..."

"Yes, I see, or I think I do."

"... when I'm being done."

"D'you go often?"

"It varies. It's quite entertaining when one isn't, er ... you know ... and even when one is ... sometimes hilarious. I'm not very good at accumulating, so I try to go at short intervals."

"And if you don't go for a long time?"

Susan was beginning to feel a rising uplift somewhere above her belly, like the feeling of a well-launched flirtation.

"Supposing you don't go for months or years?"

"Nobody can make you go, but you get a polite letter from the secretary, asking if you are well and untroubled, or saying that someone thinks you have something on your mind. I've had one of those ... I'd lost my fixture list."

"A sort of Big Sister thing?"

"I don't think of it that way."

"How many members are there?"

"Not sure. A couple of hundred, I suppose. Meetings every three weeks, between fifteen and twenty at a time and then there's the Men's."

"Women only?"

"There's also a sort of mixed group, but it's not the same sort of thing."

"Where does it meet? Presumably not in Copenhagen?"

"Oh no. That was business; no, I'm visiting friends in Edinburgh. The Club's near us at Wesbiton."

"Fascinating! Probably need some such thing myself. Not a very active social life."

"One does get to know people rather well, quite quickly."

They were both silent for a minute.

"Is that it, on the floor?"

Susan looked. It was her fixture list. God knows how she had dropped it (again) but somehow she felt under a compulsion of good manners to hand it up to this interested stranger.

It was actually a leaflet of rules with the fixtures inserted loose. There was no heading or address. It simply began:

1. A membership candidate must be introduced by a member and before a vote is taken on her admission she must publicly promise to obey the rules and receive six of the best.

2. A member must not tell or set a lie, or suppress a truth on club business.

3. A member must not hazard the confidentiality of the club's business, save to recruit a new member.

4. A member who is ashamed or breaks these rules, must confess to a meeting of the club, or to one or more members privately, or by letter. A meeting decides if she shall be punished.

5. Punishment shall be executed at meetings, with six cane strokes on the bare or more as the meeting shall decide.

6. In letters and records, members must be identified only by numbers. Their confessions and punishments must be minuted.

Fiona handed the leaflet down, remarking that she supposed that Susan had broken rule three.

"'Fraid so ... not for the first time either."

There was another pause. The ship's motion suggested a change of course; and then Susan made up her mind.

"You sound as if you might like to join ... might you? It won't get me off, because I couldn't know that you might be interested till after you saw my end ... but all the same?"

"I'd like to think about it. I'm very attracted. The trouble is that I only go south occasionally."

"I could enquire for you."

"You know, this is the most extraordinary experience in my life?"

She started to climb down to floor level. Susan, from her bunk, saw well-manicured toe-nails on the ladder, followed by slim legs through a flimsy veil and then a dark seductive triangle furrowed at the lower end; next came a smooth belly, a pair of tight breasts and finally the intense blue eyes from the mirror. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked seriously down. She was wearing some faint but evocative perfume. A draught from somewhere stirred her fair hair.

Susan, her ordinary mind in suspense, put her back against the wall to make room. Fiona was moving in. Susan, against all rules, was offering something which Fiona had not got. Who was seducing who?

"Better turn the light out."

The blanket and top sheet were folded back in the dark and Fiona slipped her way into the narrow bed. It was more or less wide enough for two, face to face. Susan felt a hand under her nightie, gently and deliciously caressing the lines of her bruises. Fiona's lips were close to her ear, into which a whisper stole through the movements, air-conditioning and engine noises.

"How many?"

"Ten."

"Cane."

"Yes."